The seventh in a series of seven sermons for the season of Lent

[“Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.” T. S. Eliot, “East Coker.” From the second of his Four Quartets.]

In 1939 the US began the top-secret Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. In 1942 Manhattan Project chemists at the University of Chicago, under the leadership of Enrico Fermi, set up a makeshift laboratory under the Stagg Field stadium. One of the things they did was take two pieces of plutonium and mechanically, by hand with a Geiger counter, bring them together to see what would happen, to see the Geiger counter increase, to see how close they could get before something big happened. It was called “twisting the tail of the dragon.” Would it blow up the stadium? Chicago? Or a chain reaction which would blow up everything? The thrill of being right on the edge makes life meaningful and exciting. What is implied is that life itself is otherwise mundane, boring, and meaningless.

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The sixth in a series of seven sermons for the season of Lent

Luke 19:28-40; 23:21

Everybody loves a parade and a party. There’s Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving. The Rose Bowl Parade on New Year’s Day, and many other local and national parades throughout the year. It’s festive to see the flowers, bands, and floats, but there is something very different about the parade on Palm Sunday.

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2 Cor 5:19

The fifth in a series of seven sermons for the season of Lent

Luther’s claim: “The cross alone is our theology,” is simply an axiom based on the what the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Cor 2:2: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Why did God have to do it this way?  After all, he could have done any number of things. He could have said, “Be done with sin and death.” But this is what he did. And we have asked ourselves why.  This is the basic question.

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Romans 8:37

The fourth in a series of seven sermons for the season of Lent

Since sacrifice is gross, old-fashioned, offensive, and foreign to our culture, and since we simply don’t grasp it, and since there are all these images, a hodgepodge, a kaleidoscope of ways of speaking of the cross, what do we do?

Following Paul and Luther, we confess: The cross alone is our theology. The cross alone is our salvation.

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1 John 2:2; 1 John 4:10

The third in a series of seven sermons on the cross for the season of Lent

The cross alone is our theology. The cross alone is our salvation. If we were to sit down and have a conversation about the question: What is the cross about?, one of us would soon say: He died on the cross to pay for my sins.

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